kóngurló
Sometimes the urge to blog comes after you’ve done something unique or seen something particularly different and interesting that you want to share. Other times, like today, the compulsion to blog came from doing something monotonous, repetitive, seemingly endless and, you might even say, boring.
Jamin is setting up a mesocosm experiment in which he is going to look at spider predation of herbivores in the presence and absence of midges. I will let him tell that story in another blog. Over the last several days, the entire group has been helping with building cages, fitting plants in them, and stocking them with leafhoppers. One of the final steps is to stock the mesocosms with spiders, or kóngurló (in Icelandic). So today was our scheduled day to go spider hunting.
The weather was less than cooperative, but we decided it didn’t matter since we were going to collect by hand and it wouldn’t really matter if it was wet or not. Well, apparently, the spiders care about the weather as much as we do. After three of us ran around for about 2 hours in the morning to three different sites, we had collected a total of only about 10 spiders. At the last site we were at, Kalfastrond, hunting seemed a little better than the other two sites (where we collected only one spider total). We went to the station for lunch and I resolved to go back to Kalfastrond to have it out with the spiders while Jamin and Kyle were going to start stocking mesocosms with what we had. I knew the spiders were there – they were present in our earlier samples, and from previous years’ collecting we knew that this was a good site. They were just hiding! By this point we had about 25 spiders (include another day’s collecting), and we needed another 25 to set up the experiment.
In the afternoon, the light drizzle let up and some sun even broke through the clouds for brief moments. I got dropped off at Kal. I was to be picked up about 3 hours later. It was me, my iPod, a bucket and a cup, and the spiders in the grass. First things first: dial up some tunes that can keep you going for an afternoon. I chose some XTC and the sound track at times seemed to simultaneously mock me and encourage me along.
Fly, fly, fly, fly on the wall;
See, see, see, seeing it all.
(“Fly on the wall”, 1982)
Despite the fact that it was cold, the midges were having some nice blanketing swarms. This made it painful at times as the midges continually went into my eyes. On a bad day, you might get one midge caught in your eye. Today was a six midge sort of day.
Laying on the grass my heart it flares like fire
The way you slap my face just fills me with desire
(“Grass”, 1986)
There are two basic spider hunting modes. The first I used sparingly mainly to get from one area of the site to another. It basically resembles a slow-motion ice skating position: chest about parallel to the ground, hands behind the back as you move one slow step at a time, continually looking down for the tell-tale movement of a spider. There were plenty of other critters scurrying about the grass, midges, harvestmen, and occasional large fly. But after a while, you begin to recognize the characteristics of the spiders we were looking for (the hunting spiders in the genus Pardosa). I can’t quite tell you what it is, something about the size (0.5-1.0 cm), the color (gray-black, sometimes with a white ball on the tip of their tails - these were the females carrying egg sacks). But more telling perhaps was the jerky scampering they do. They move in fits and starts that initially clues you in to their presence, and then they start again. The rest is child’s play, you simply put the sample cup near where they are and coax them in with your other hand. Then you transfer them to the bucket with all their other compadres and hope they don’t eat each other.
This is what most of my day looked like from my perspective:
The main searching position, though is simply on your hands and knees. This gets you up close and personal with the grassland and all the interesting things that are present there. I saw several other insects doing their thing. One is an group that is near and dear to my heart, the agromyzid leafminers. This is a group I did my dissertation on and the little serpentine miners were in their full glory on the Meadow Buttercups (Ranunculus acris) – the leafminer is probably a Phytomyza species.
On the same Buttercups were also some little geometrid caterpillars that were chewing up the petals and stamens.
The slow searching was more mentally tiring than anything. I would find a spider and then it might be 15 minutes before I found another. Then I would find three in a row. At one point I went almost an hour without finding any. My back was aching. Up-dog, down-dog. Stretch a bit. It became a like a crawling meditation (for those of you have that done walking meditations). I needed to be a little careful where I put my hands. Some areas seemed more like goose or sheep latrines some of it relatively fresh. I had plastic gloves on, but it was still worth avoiding. This all added to the surreal feeling of it all: sitting on all fours in the middle of grassland near the arctic circle looking for spiders. And this is what I get paid for – not a bad gig!
Paper, iron, won't buy Eden
working for paper and for iron
work for the right to keep my tie on
(“Paper and Iron”, 1980)
The sky got darker, the wind picked up and the spiders seemed to disappear almost as quickly. My eyes constantly glanced over the hill to see if the rain to come my way, or maybe I was checking to see if the truck had arrived to pick me up. The playlist finished. The silence of the wind was broken by the terns overhead. The midges had settled down for the evening. Around 5pm, David and Josiah came. The bucket was handed over to the mesocosm master.
At final count, I had managed to get 26 kóngurló. Not bad for an afternoon’s work.
Darling, don't you ever sit and ponder
darling did you ever think
About the building of the hills a yonder
all this life stuff's closely linked
(“Season’s Cycle, 1986)
By August, there were clear visible differences between our treatments and we decided it was time to collect some data. We harvested most of the above-ground biomass with scissors and counted the number of culms. We took the clipped grass back to Wisconsin and plan to analyze it for %N and stable isotopes.
Here are three representative pots (#40, 41 and 42). 40 is a "midges added" pot (far right), 41 is an "inorganic N added" pot (middle) and 42 is a "control" pot (left). We'll see what the data show, but we're pretty confident in finding differences in biomass. We also collected the resin bags from below the pots so we'll see how much N was leached out through the soil.
